“In
the summer of 2010, Shirley Sherrod was catapulted into a media storm that blew
apart her life… A right-wing blogger disseminated a video clip of a speech she
had given to the Georgia
NAACP…

The
media ramped up the outrage and, before Sherrod had a chance to defend herself,
the Obama administration demanded her resignation. Then, after hearing… the
entire speech, public officials and media professionals admitted to being duped
and apologized for their rush to judgment...

The
Courage to Hope addresses this regrettable episode but also tells Sherrod’s own
story of growing up in Georgia
during the violent years of Jim Crow when her father was murdered by a white
neighbor who was never brought to justice.”

--
Excerpted from the Inside Book Jacket.

A couple of
years ago, arch-conservative Andrew Breitbart (since deceased) launched a
character assassination on Shirley Sherrod which almost cost the then U.S.D.A. State
Director her career while temporarily ruining her reputation. For, he had
posted on his website a video edited to make Ms. Sherrod appear to be an
unrepentant bigot against Caucasians.

Truth be told,
the tenor of her heartfelt remarks in that speech delivered to the NAACP were
exactly the opposite. In the address, she spoke about how she had overcome the
bitterness she’d felt about the South (including the murder of her own father by
a white man never brought to justice) to the point that she became willing to
help poor folks of any color.

However, Breitbart’s
misleading video quoted Ms. Sherod out of context, making no mention of her
having made an emotional breakthrough. Instead, it was deliberately designed to
leave viewers with the impression that she was an inveterate racist.

Sadly, the
clip went viral and soon not only right-wing pundits but even presumably
sympathetic colleagues ranging from NAACP President Ben Jealous to officials in
the Obama administration began calling for the poor woman’s head.

Sherrod was publicly humiliated in the national press as if the
poster child for racial intolerance.

Furthermore,
she was summarily fired on the spot by her boss without being given an opportunity
to defend herself. In the end, the truth did come out, affording the country a
very-valuable teachable moment about innocence until proven guilty when the unfairly
accused was ultimately exonerated.

Sherrod finally
gets to set the record straight in The Courage to Hope, a poignant half-autobiography/half-tale
of redemption. Not only does the moving memoir address the infamous incident
which thrust the author into the limelight but, perhaps more importantly, it
recounts a life story which reveals her to be a real role model well worthy of admiration
and emulation.

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The Sly Fox Film Reviews

KamWilliams.com

The Sly Fox Film Reviews publishes the content of film critic Kam Williams. Voted Most Outstanding Journalist of the Decade by the Disilgold Soul Literary Review in 2008, Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications around the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and the Caribbean. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee and Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.